I still wanted more specific information on Andrea Cogburn’s death, so I called my friend at the morgue, guy named Elliot Watt.
“Elliot, Darvelle.”
“Yes.”
“Elliot, the way you just said ‘yes’ didn’t sound like you were saying: ‘Yes? This is Elliot, what do you want?’ It sounded like you were saying: ‘Yes.’ Like, ‘yes’ as a definitive answer to a question. Like, as if I had asked: ‘Is the sky blue?’ And you had said: ‘Yes.’ But I haven’t asked you a question yet. And you still said ‘yes’ that way. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Detective Darvelle, I do see what you are saying. And yes, you are correct in your hearing of how I said ‘yes.’ See, I know you are going to ask me for something, to come down and look at something, and I know that if I say no, you’ll just pester me until I say yes. So I just decided to go ahead and say yes to the question you haven’t even asked me yet—will I pull something for you—even though I’m not really in the mood right now to do it. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yes. And great,” I said. “I’m on my way to the morgue now.”
“You’re lucky, it’s a reasonably slow day. For Los Angeles. If we were in fucking Boise, everyone would be going apeshit. But we’re not in Boise, so it’s a reasonably slow day.”
“Please pull the file for a woman named Andrea Cogburn. White. Died between the ages of, I’d say, twenty-six and twenty-nine. Probably six, seven, eight years ago. Drug overdose. Is that enough info?”
I could tell that Elliot was writing everything down. He said, “Yeah, that’s enough.” And then: “I’m too good to you, Darvelle. I really am.”
“I’ll bring you a present. See you soon.”
It really helps to have a friend at the morgue. Getting autopsy reports, coroner’s reports, Elliot Watt’s own personal opinions on stuff—it all goes a long way. Sometimes breaks open a case. I have to tell you, Elliot Watt is a bit of a strange cat. That being said, he’s the perfect guy to work in a morgue. He’s a bit of a loner. He has an analytical mind. He’s innately drawn to the macabre. And he looks the part. He literally looks like he belongs there. He’s got black hair, alabaster skin, big blue bug eyes, a big mouth with too many teeth. Almost like he himself is dead and has been embalmed. You see him walking around in the darkness of the morgue, sort of shuffling along. A bit like a zombie in a movie.
And I think that’s a good thing. There are certain jobs where you want the guy holding them to look and act the part. The guy at the morgue is one of them. A lawyer, your lawyer, is another one. You want your lawyer to look and act a certain way, because it’s your self-interest he or she is usually protecting. But a doctor, that’s the top example. A doctor in charge of your health. In charge of whether you’re going to, you know, die. True story: One time I went to the doctor, new doctor, just for a checkup, and there was music playing in the waiting room. But it wasn’t terrible adult contemporary, or classical music, like it’s supposed to be. It was the Clash. “Lost in the Supermarket.” Great song. Amazing song. One of the best songs ever. But the wrong song for the doctor’s office. You know? I mean, at that point I didn’t want to go to that doctor anymore. I wanted to party with him. I mean, I definitely wanted to party with him. But I didn’t want to have him as my doctor anymore.
I made a stop to buy Elliot a little something. Then I jetted downtown to North Mission Road to visit the L.A. County morgue.
I walked in. There was Elliot sitting at his neat desk, ready for me, file in front of him—Andrea Cogburn’s file, I assumed.
“Here’s her file,” he said, sliding it over to me.
“Thank you, sir. I got you a couple of presents. Some magazines. A little reading for your downtime.”
I presented each one to Elliot, pulling them out one at a time from a brown bag. “The new Popular Mechanics, because I know you like it. I have no idea why, but I know you do.”
“Thank you,” he said as he placed it on his desk. “I have not read this one yet.”
I pulled out the next magazine. “An Over Forty porn mag,” I said. “All the women inside are mature. Being the twisted bastard you are, I thought you might like this.”
“Well, I really don’t read that kind of thing, but okay,” he said as he slid it carefully into a drawer and then closed the drawer very gently and quietly.
I pulled out the next magazine. “And then I got you this too. Cranes Today magazine.” I handed it to him.
He looked at it and said, truly confused, “What the hell is this?”
“It’s a copy of Cranes Today magazine,” I said.
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s a magazine all about cranes. The machines, not the birds.”
“Yeah, Darvelle, I can see that. There’s a crane on the cover. I still don’t get it.”
“Well, if you’re going to be that guy who publicly reads Popular Mechanics, then why not take it all the way into true freakdom and read something like this. Just go sit in a park and be the guy who’s on a totally different planet from the rest of us.”
“I don’t understand you, Darvelle. I really don’t. Is that an insult? A joke? What the eff? I mean, I’m helping you. I’m giving you material you otherwise couldn’t get.”
“What the eff.” That’s what he said.
“I think you might like it. Just read it.”
Elliot didn’t have any chairs in front of his desk. He had two against the wall opposite his desk, a little coffee table as well, almost like a waiting room. I took a chair and looked through Andrea Cogburn’s file. There was a picture of her in her bed, dead. She didn’t look dead. She looked asleep. Sometimes when you see pictures of the dead, they look dead. I mean dead. Keaton Fuller looked dead. A giant hole in his chest and out his back. But Andrea Cogburn just looked asleep. She was in her nightgown, in her own bed.
I focused in on the details. Andrea died six years ago, at age twenty-nine, with alcohol, cocaine, Valium, and Ambien in her system. Cause of death: She stopped breathing. Just that simple. You stop breathing, you die. Cessation of breathing isn’t the only fatal outcome of an overdose, though. Truth is, an overdose can mean lots of things. It can mean you had a heart attack. It can mean you had a brain aneurysm. Or, as in this case, it can mean your lungs stopped taking in air and pushing it out again.
I looked up at Elliot. He was engrossed in Cranes Today magazine. Engrossed.
“So,” I said. “Andrea Cogburn stopped breathing. What does that mean exactly, Elliot? In Andrea’s case? What happened exactly? Why did she stop breathing?”
He lowered the Cranes Today magazine and peered over it at me. He then dropped it on the desk and started talking.
“Basically, on the surface, it means that she was drunk and on coke and then took Valium and Ambien to come down. But she took too many and her throat relaxed too much and she stopped breathing and died. Now, essentially, that’s how people with sleep apnea die when they die. Sleep apnea. You know it? It’s pretty common.”
I nodded.
He continued, “When I say that’s how people with sleep apnea die, I don’t mean the drugs and alcohol part. I’m talking about the throat part. Their throats relax and close up, and they stop breathing. But people with sleep apnea usually don’t die. Their brains send a signal to wake the fuck up, and they do. They gasp for breath, then go back to sleep, then do it again. All fucking night. But they don’t die. Now, I’m not saying Andrea Cogburn had sleep apnea. Okay? I’m not saying that. But her throat relaxed and closed up like someone with sleep apnea. Then, if her brain sent the signal to wake up, and I don’t know that it did, but if it did, she didn’t hear it because she was on too many pills. And if her brain didn’t send the signal, which is also possible because she was so wasted, then, well, her throat was closed up and she stopped breathing. Same result, obviously, with or without the signal.”
He took a deep breath and continued, “But you know what I think, in addition to all that?”
See? This is why I really come down here. Sure, it’s great to see the file. But I can read the file back at my desk. What’s really great is to hear, in person, the theories of an expert, a guy who lives and breathes this shit, a proper Morgue Guy.
Elliot said, “I think she offed herself. Suicide. Very hard to prove. After all, what is suicide when you’re talking about dying from too many drugs? You could say that everyone who ever died from taking too many drugs committed suicide, if we’re talking about a somewhat loose interpretation of the word. But this time, I don’t think the term has to be taken that loosely.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Girl that size, with what she put in her body in one night? All that Ambien and Valium? And apparently, according to the cops and her own mother, a longtime drug user who had to know what drugs do? That’s somebody saying: I don’t want to wake up.”
I looked at Elliot’s big blue bug eyes and said, “Yeah.” And then I said, “Thanks, Elliot. Thanks for your help.”
He nodded and picked up Cranes Today. “You know how much a crane weighs? Thirty tons. Sixty thousand fucking pounds. I mean, think about how heavy that is. Jesus.”
“See, I told you you’d like it! I told you, Elliot!”
“Get out of here, Darv.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks again.”
I put Andrea’s file back on Elliot’s desk and headed out. As I was exiting, Elliot’s office door swinging shut behind me, I looked over my shoulder through the door’s window and could just make out Elliot’s right hand going for the drawer with the Over Forty in it.